


Wherein Jim and Pike eat lemons and commit mutual acts of extortion

by kayliemalinza



Series: Rambleverse [33]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gore, Injury, Kayliemalinza's Rambleverse, Kirk's Temporary Captaincy (Rambleverse Timeline), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-16
Updated: 2010-10-16
Packaged: 2017-11-23 21:38:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/626784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kayliemalinza/pseuds/kayliemalinza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pike hands over captaincy of his beloved ship... except not really, and certainly not gracefully. </p><p>Takes place after the promotion ceremony at the end of STXI. </p><p>Teaser: "Would you like a lemon?" Pike asks, and waves a king's gesture over the table. There's a dish of lemon wedges there, liberated from the hor d'oeuvres table or maybe ordered specially from the kitchen because he is Admiral Christopher Fucking Pike and you will cut up a lemon for him if he wants you to.</p><p>Jim does not particularly want a lemon but he'll take anything Pike offers. "Thank you," he says and picks out a thin slice, no seeds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wherein Jim and Pike eat lemons and commit mutual acts of extortion

**Author's Note:**

> AO3 isn't flexible enough to allow for all the formatting in this fic, so feel free to read it on my [Dreamwidth](http://kayliemalinza.dreamwidth.org/258796.html) or [Livejournal](http://kayliemalinza.livejournal.com/266265.html) instead.

The party's finally over: really over, with the lights at 90% and the buffet being cleared away dish by dish. Jim, less drunk than he'd normally be at lights-up but still quantifiably blitzed, staggers toward the doors in a captainly manner. He's captain now, so everything he does is captainly. Earlier, he produced a captainly fart.

Jim twirls in a circle to bring himself to a stop because he sees Admiral Pike parked next to one of the few tables that still has its chairs and a tablecloth. Out of everyone they have the right to close the party, Jim figures, so he shuffles his way over and takes a seat. He rubs his aching shoulder blades against the faux-gilded chair back and gives the ol' man a once-over.

Admiral Pike is rocking the casual insouciance. His legs are stretched out, the left one crooked slightly to keep his trick knee from locking up, and he's dressed down: his sweater from that morning is missing and his uniform jacket is hanging from the handlebar of his chair, hem brushing dangerously against a wheel. Jim doubts that the PT department would stick an admiral in a wheelchair that uses axle grease but Pike looked very dashing in his uniform earlier (almost as dashing as Jim, in fact) so, slim chances aside, Jim is agitated by the idea that it might get stained.

On the other hand, Pike looks very good in his undershirt, too. It's all, you know, _rakish_. And discardable.

Jim gets caught up in a mental spiral of all the possible ways the undershirt could be discarded (Pike could rip it open like a superhero; it could transform into shimmery oil and cascade down his body; Jim could lift up the hem of it inch by inch and lick every freckle he can find; etc.) and forgets to say a proper greeting. Technically they've seen each other all night but it doesn't count. They've talked in each other's vicinity but not _to_ each other. Jim and Pike just bounced from cluster to cluster in a party mingling version of Brownian motion, so he wants to say hello.

"Hello, Admiral," Jim says.

Pike nods. "Captain."

Jim is all beamed out from appreciating his new title in the long hours since this morning's ceremony but he powers through and pulls up one last smile, just for Pike. It's not as toothy as the others but Pike has seen most of Jim's repertoire anyway. He'll appreciate the nuance.

"Would you like a lemon?" Pike asks, and waves a king's gesture over the table. There's a dish of lemon wedges there, liberated from the hor d'oeuvres table or maybe ordered specially from the kitchen because he is Admiral Christopher Fucking Pike and you will cut up a lemon for him if he wants you to.

Jim does not particularly want a lemon but he'll take anything Pike offers. "Thank you," he says and picks out a thin slice, no seeds.

Pike takes one, too, bites at the corner to tease the flesh away from the rind and then puts it whole into his mouth. Jim can see flashes of his teeth and hear the soft calamity of citrus evisceration. Pike smiles, purses his lips, and reaches up to pull out the empty rind in one smooth motion. He drops the rind on the table and chews the leftovers leisurely. He sees Jim watching him. "I'm trying to ward off scurvy," he says, and swallows.

Jim feels himself falling sideways into subtextual quicksand. Pike isn't in danger of scurvy but his spinal cord still looks like Swiss cheese. Pike is definitely a fan of dark humor

he calls the subdural brace his "jewelry"  
as if he can take it off  
as if wire doesn't coil through the cartilage  
to lash the splintered vertebrae together  
as if the metal caps erupting from the skin  
are medallions  
instead of sewers  
through which the doctors  
thread their spindly tools

but Jim can't exactly join in without chancing offense and anyway, what if Pike isn't referring to his back at all? What if he's diverting attention from a different problem? Pike's brain is still scrambled from the coma so who knows, maybe he's eating lemons because to him they taste like blueberry pie.

The question then is, does Pike know that they don't taste the way they're supposed to? Maybe he's just blundering blithely through his day, pleasantly surprised that lemons are more delicious than he remembers, in which case it would be cruel to point out that the deliciousness is the mere result of a psychological condition

 

'mere'  
like the tender aftershocks  
of an earthquake and  
barely worth mention,  
not like the day he woke up:  
when he spoke a language no-one knew  
he barked orders at the shadows  
he blacked his sister's eye.  
he fell, asleep or comatose,  
and awoke at uncertain intervals  
to ask for water  
or for someone  
to remind him  
of his name.

Pike is tough. He can handle a little dysguesia, Jim decides.

In fact, he probably has it typed up on his special list of "Medical Problems That I Will Destroy With Sheer Willpower" because although Pike is not a real organizational person he does enjoy a good list now and then. He particularly likes lists of things that Jim is doing wrong but Jim is a fast learner and hasn't gotten one of those lists since second year. He doesn't expect to get one anytime soon, either. He saved the planet, ok, and there's just no way to criticize that without looking like an ass.

Granted, if anyone could pull that off it would be Pike (Bones doesn't count because he doesn't criticize specific actions so much as spew inchoate diatribes in Jim's general direction, and he only does that because he's concerned about Jim's ego. It's very sweet.)

Pike is watching him with his mouth all curled-up and soft and Jim remembers his manners. It's rude to leave people out of the conversation.

"Does your lemon taste like blueberry pie?" he asks politely.

"No," says Pike, mouth going rigid with worry. "Does yours?"

There goes Jim's theory out the airlock. He'd spend the appropriate amount of time being upset at that but Pike asked him a question and Jim realizes that he can't answer because he hasn't tasted his lemon yet. That seems like the height of rudeness after Pike was nice enough to offer it, so Jim bites into the lemon posthaste.

"Ow!" He yanks the lemon away and presses a hand to his mouth, prodding at the slice of pain on the left side of his lower lip. "What the hell," he mutters. He glares at the lemon because what a motherfucker it is, hurting him like that without asking first.

"You have a cut on your lip," Pike says. "I noticed it when you walked up." Jim's brain is prodding him to draw a conclusion from the timeline: Pike notices the cut as Jim walks up, then Jim sits down, then Pike offers him a lemon, therefore Pike is aware of the cut prior to encouraging Jim to eat citric acid, therefore what? Jim's mental processes are all staticky and the insight is just not making it down the line so he gives up. It's probably not anything he doesn't already know.

"Oh," says Jim. He watches Pike pick through the bowl for a voluptuous wedge and asks, "Why are you eating lemons, again?"

Pike blinks at him as if that's an odd question to ask. Then he smiles wryly and says with a shrug, "I've eaten them since I was a kid."

Jim feels his forehead go all wrinkly with judginess and he tries to smooth it out, he does, but lemons are sour and his lip still hurts. "Seriously?" he says.

Pike laughs. "Seriously," he answers. "My sister swore that they tasted good and I believed her. By the time I figured out that she was playing a trick on me, I'd gotten used to the taste." He tilts his head and adds, "That was a parable, by the way."

Now Jim's forehead is wrinkly in confusion. He's maybe more drunk than he thought. "Parable for what?" he asks.

Pike snorts and doesn't answer.

Jim wavers for a moment on whether to ask again; Pike won't hesitate to take advantage of Jim in his impaired state (meaning Pike will tease Jim mercilessly and get his head all twisted up in knots, not that Pike will twist Jim's shirt in knots and use it to tie him to something, and _then_ start in with the merciless teasing) and Jim doesn't feel up to dealing with that right now

 

his skin is bruised and scraped  
from chance encounters in the hallways.  
the camera flashes slap  
and every next-of-kin  
with red-rimmed eyes  
is a scab cracking open.

so he stays quiet.

Pike gives Jim an unreadable look and lets the silence lie. He ravages another piece of fruit in the hot embrace of his mouth and Jim suckles his fruit, too, marking each stab of pain (the only sensation as demanding as he is) with a soft, needy sound. They watch each other do it and are jealous of lemons for their own particular reasons.

Pike tosses the lemon rind onto the table and asks, "What happened to your lip?"

Jim sets his half-eaten lemon slice on the table next to Pike's. It soaks into the tablecloth beneath it and looks grotesque, like a diaphanous carcass beside a clean set of bones. Pike has always been more polished than him, impenetrable and composed.

Well, maybe to other people he is. Jim's found a few cracks.

"Guess I bit it," Jim says in answer. "I've been really nervous lately." He ducks his head and draws up a smile (a shy variant that he doesn't use often) and when he looks up, Pike is wary, like he knows what Jim scurrilously intends to say with that smile and what the smile says in spite of Jim and all the things-that-could-be-said which exist on the continuum between.

"You're right to be nervous," Pike says. "You've just been promoted to a position for which you are not remotely qualified."

"I'm qualified," Jim protests.

Pike laughs. It's not a particularly kind laugh but it's not acerbic, either, so Jim doesn't scowl. "Kirk, you haven't even completed the requisite courses to command a scow, much less a Constitution class."

"I handled her before just fine," Jim says, and he isn't trying to rub it in that Pike was out of commission at the time (first as a POW in _Narada's_ dank underbelly and later in Medbay, staring at the tremors of his arms and praying that they wouldn't get worse) but facts are facts. Anyway, the only reason Jim doesn't have those credits is because Pike kept advising him to bump them for electives like exosurvival and field medicine.

"That was an emergency situation," Pike answers. "The quotidian operations are much more complex."

"I can't believe you're about to start lecturing me about inventory and consumption stats," Jim grumbles because really, after all the times Pike's ranted about armchair admirals and bureaucrats with heads up their asses— sometimes when he knows Jim is listening, but more often when he doesn't (Jim was practicing his stealth maneuvers, ok, and anyway Pike's office door was wide open)—he's really going to go there?

Seems like it. Pike is flashing him a full-on smirk; none of that half-hidden stuff he doles out during business hours.

Jim gapes. "You're saying that I'm not fit to captain because of the _paperwork?_ "

Pike waves his hand dismissively. "Not the paperwork," he says. "You can delegate that to your first. I'm talking about everything the paperwork represents."

Jim peers at Pike's face, trying to determine if he's about to steer this conversation into philosophical waters. There's not a definite sign either way (Pike has his fingers laced, which he likes to do before he calmly lobs a mindfuck at Jim, but he isn't flicking his eyes to the side like he does when prepping for a low-key rant.)

Jim runs a quick self-diagnostic: his buzz is fading, but instead of clarity it's being replaced by a stupefying haze of exhaustion. Pike is probably still on a cocktail of painkillers but he's held his own in slippery thinking just fine these past few weeks so Jim decides not to risk it. He goes on the offensive instead: "You were the youngest officer to be advanced to captain in over a century," he says. "You wanna tell me you weren't qualified?"

"I'd already been commissioned and in the field for five years," Pike says, looking mildly perturbed that Jim would even bother launching such an easily defeated attack.

Jim is perturbed, too. He's had a long day, alright, so maybe he's a little stupid right now but at least he's still pretty.

Pike shakes his head and reaches down to pull his legs into right-angle bends, the knees jutting out past the seat. He probably could have done that without his hands (he's even started walking again, zig-zaggy steps from bedside to chair) but the nerve signals get mixed up and he's probably tired. Pike continues, "My first ship had a crew of twenty-four, not four hundred, and the promotion occurred under extenuating circumstances."

Jim would strip naked and give Pike a lap dance if he thought it would make Pike reveal any information on that mysterious episode (not that it would work; Pike has never displayed much interest in seeing Jim naked so clearly something is wrong with the guy. Heterosexuality is not an excuse) because Pike's service file sure as hell doesn't mention it. Not at Jim's level of authorization, anyway.

He would have hacked that obstacle first year but Pike had already busted Jim for using the database to dig up dirt on Bones' ex, whom Bones had conveniently forgotten served as security ensign under fresh-faced Lt. Pike back in 2237. Bones didn't see why that mattered, but of course he didn't see the image Jim found floating in the archives, where Pike is carrying Bones' ex-wife and Bones' ex-wife is carrying her own severed arm.

Pike went fire-and-brimstone as soon as he got the ping about Jim's data-use history. Jim feels a little bad about the whole thing now that he knows Haprin as a person rather than an Ex, and he could have lived without seeing twenty-something Pike with a thousand-yard stare, but he maintains that Pike overreacted. Still, it'll take more than running fifty laps around the admin building to stop Jim from scrounging information

 

something like his mother's rib  
snowy pink and crooking  
from her body like a finger,  
draping a slender shadow on  
the slick-edged parting of her skin  
and pearlescent lungs beneath.  
No metadata but a timestamp  
three hours prior  
or four  
or a day  
However long it was  
before Pike broke into barracks  
to tell Jim that she was  
alive  
and heading  
home.

Unfortunately (and completely unfairly) IT put some crazy data protection measures into place after that, so Jim's had to resign himself to not knowing all sorts of useful information, like the salient details of how and why Pike got his first command. Although, considering Pike's behavior around the poor guy, maybe Admiral née Captain Arliss just wanted that smart-ass commander off his ship.

Something clicks and Jim suddenly realizes that Pike recruited him on the assumption that Jim would make captain faster than he did, even subtracting the seven months Pike was MIA (the details of which are also confidential. Fucking Starfleet.) Jim grins. "I have a pretty fast learning curve," he says. "I think I can handle it."

"Kirk," Pike says seriously. "I'm not telling you this as a reverse-psychology motivational. I am giving you a warning. Captaining _Enterprise_ without adequate training and experience can damage the ship, those under your command, and possibly yourself." He's giving Jim this significant stare, and Jim would say it was his standard hardass hairy eyeball but there's something going on around the mouth: a sort of guilty softness.

"What do you mean by 'damage,'" Jim asks carefully, watching for tells and wishing he were in a better mental state.

Pike sighs and scrubs a hand through his hair. "A mistake due to incompetence can lead to court-martial and may well terminate your career. The stress may impact your health." He pauses, then adds, "A complete mental breakdown is not outside the realm of possibility."

"But—" Jim licks his lips. "You recommended me for the posting. Hell, you practically bullied the Admiralty into it. Why would you—"

"You're the only idiot I trust to turn my ship back over to me when I've recovered," Pike says. He twists his fingers into the fine cloth of his trousers for a second then stops his fidgeting with a sudden force of will. He looks Jim in the eye and says quietly, "I'm throwing you to the wolves."

"No, it's not like that," Jim says.

"Do you understand the implication?" Pike says, aggravated in equal measure to Jim's earnestness. "I love that ship more than I love you."

Jim should respond that Starfleet trains them to value abstract ideals more than people; maybe Pike is displacing that onto _Enterprise_ but he's still toeing the philosophical line. Failing that, Jim can make some smug remark about how regardless of his hurtful intentions Pike has just admitted in plain language that he loves Jim (and Jim is one huge internal wiggle over that, have no doubt.)

Instead, Jim thinks about the crackly-cold night when he was twelve and his mother stood him outside and pressed her fingertips against the raw crests of his cheekbones

 

she smiled at him from the hospital bed  
and waved him closer, closer,  
until she could cradle him  
on the few soft parts of her body  
left between plaster and gauze.  
hello, sweetheart, she said,  
and touched his face with careful fingers  
that smelled of blood and antiseptic.

and pointed his face up, up, up to see the plasma trail of an Apollo class traversing Orion's Belt. She poured an excitable stream into his ears about how her ship is bigger and faster than that, shiny inside and out, and will take her to planets more strange than Jim can imagine, planets so far away that it'll take her a year just to get there.

 

she stood stiffly by the shuttle-hatch  
pink and cool-skinned from the wind  
and joked that Starfleet gets good doctors  
just to make the sick-leaves shorter.  
be strong, sweetheart (goodbye)  
have fun and study hard (goodbye)  
take care of yourself (goodbye)  
(goodbye goodbye goodbye)

What Jim says is, "I'm used to it."

Pike's eyes hit Jim like riflescopes, but his reply is faux-amiable: "Fine, we'll go with that." Pike isn't going to coddle him when he puts up a front, either through impatience or disinterest, and Jim likes that. Bones'll pick and bother until Jim spills his guts just to get a moment's peace, but Pike is big on boundaries. He doesn't want to see the way that the battering of the world turns other people's insides to slop. Whether that's because his own insides are bruised just as badly, Jim doesn't know. Pike's outside is, as usual, a mask of smooth comportment and maybe there's a weird sheen in his eyes right now, but that's probably just a side effect of the medication.

Still, Jim might be able to get something out of this moment if he pushes just right.

He scoots forward, angling his feet carefully around the metal footrests of Pike's wheelchair to close those last few inches. Pike shifts his shoulders against the backrest—if he were standing he would have stepped sideways to give himself space without retreating—so Jim eases off a bit. He withdraws his upper body but slots his legs between Pike's, knees touching knees.

"Sir, promise me something," Jim says. "When you come back to _Enterprise_ —" his mind whispers 'if' but Jim doesn't want to know what Pike's face will do if he says it aloud "—keep me on as first officer."

Pike closes his eyes briefly. He raises his arm to—Jim doesn't know what, to rub the stress-sink between his brows, maybe—but it jerks left, trembling through the little finger, so Pike drops it into his lap instead. "Kirk, there's a reason you were originally assigned to the Farragut."

"It's not like they can stick me back on it," Jim says. The Farragut barely exists anymore; the saucer section is crumpled up out of reach within the event horizon and the rest of it is a sliced-up mess, the edges crimped and melted from _Narada's_ guns, showing stress-cracks on the hull from when it was towed from a deteriorating orbit.

Pike shakes his head. "Kirk, I was your sole advisor, and to a greater degree of involvement than is usual." There's a little dryness in his tone, and maybe some leftover impatience, too, but Jim chooses to ignore it. Maybe he took up a little too much of Pike's time but Pike recruited him and he chose to advise Jim just as he chose to take on other advisees

 

unlike Uncle Frank,  
who wanted nothing  
more than to unroll  
his sleeping bag  
in the shadows  
of new mountains,  
but was held fast  
to the farmhouse  
and the children  
his sister left  
behind

and anyway, wasn't Jim worth it in the end?

"Are you saying you're sick of me?" Jim asks lightly.

Pike waves that off like the misdirect that it is. "You need experience serving under another commanding officer," he says. "It'll be good for you."

Just like it was a good experience for Jim to stay with his father's parents for a few weeks, seeing his own eyes stare back from holos of a man he never knew; a good experience to stay with his friend Howie's family, with their menorah and datachips of classical paintings; a good experience to sign up for every camp he could find and, for one disastrous semester, boarding school.

What Jim really wanted was to stay in one place for longer than six months, snuggled up between his mother

 

who is not on some planet  
so full of diamonds that  
they crunch underfoot  
and garnish her palms  
with glittering cuts

and Uncle Frank

 

who is not in a desert valley  
scraping himself raw  
against red striations of rock  
and gorging on the loneliness  
that Jim could never stomach

and Sam

 

who is not on Tarsus IV  
who was never on Tarsus IV  
who tells Jim how he really feels  
instead of "I'm fine" lies  
undone by a footnote  
in an essay Jim read second year.

"Sir, no sir," says Jim. "I'm on that ship, with that crew, and you. That's where I belong."

"Jim—"

He interrupts with, "I'll have Doctor McCoy smuggle me on again if I have to." It's dangerous, as a joke: Bones slid by with a slap on the wrist but the Admiralty made a point of listing the charges anyway, 'just to keep the paperwork in order.' But Jim's not joking; he's using the voice-of-no-argument on the man he learned it from and leaning forward, like maybe his seriousness will escape in the gap between them if he doesn't. He covers Pike's hand with his own and presses down until he can feel the bones—dainty, fanned-out things—beneath the bruise-easy skin. "You know it's my destiny, right?"

Pike's lip curls like destiny means as much to him as the lemon rinds on the table: useful for getting leverage and keeping your hands clean, but otherwise irrelevant. (Perhaps he's right to; the elder Spock, a man also dissatisfied by destiny, leaned over the banister to say, incredulous, "That is Christopher Pike?" and then, "Fascinating.")

"Of course," Jim says with a theatrical shrug, "I guess I could settle for someone else if you don't have anything left to teach me, old man." The only response to that is the faint twitch of Pike's eyebrows, but Jim knows he's won. He smiles sweetly to take the sting out of defeat because, despite gritted-teeth determination, Pike is fragile these days.

Pike bites out "Fine" the same instant that he yanks back his hand, probably trying to take advantage of the distraction. Jim's getting a second wind, though; he lets Pike escape but drags his thumb across the hollow of Pike's palm on the way out, and the heat of it lingers.

Pike flexes his hand in an impressively casual manner before clenching it into a fist, fingertips protecting the palm. "I'll put you on my roster," he says, "but don't expect any special treatment."

Jim does expect special treatment, actually. It's what special people get. Still, he gives the politic answer: "Of course. So we have an agreement."

"We do," says Pike. He knocks Jim's outstretched hand back down with a glance—unnecessarily so, because Jim wasn't getting uppity there; agreements are sealed with a handshake—and leans forward to lift his feet back onto the footrests.

Jim asks, "Want some help?" He steels himself to quietly accept a refusal even though it'll make him antsy and perturbed, like standing by while a woman opens the door for herself.

Pike, however, gives the slightest of pauses and says, "Yes, please."

That should set off warning bells in Jim's head but instead he kneels in front of Pike. (He could do this just as well by leaning forward in his chair, but he wants to do this, wants to show deference despite the stripes on his sleeve.) The round bone of Pike's ankle fits perfectly into Jim's palm, hot and insistent through the sock. Both feet are in place now but he fusses with setting them at careful parallels, reluctant to move away.

Suddenly Pike grabs onto his shoulders and hauls him up with so much force (fuck, Pike is strong) that Jim bangs his elbow on the armrest and would have fallen sideways if it weren't for Pike's fingers clenched in the fabric of his uniform jacket, keeping Jim right where he wants him.

He catches Jim's lower lip between his teeth and tongues cruelly at the split until they both taste blood. Jim whines, pushes away just enough to feel Pike pull him back. Maybe Jim could break the hold but Pike would fight it, Pike wants Jim to be near him, so Jim lets himself pitch forward again and tries to kiss Pike around the bite.

It doesn't work: Pike's lips are curled back from his teeth in a snarl and despite his grip and Jim's straining legs the angles are too awkward, the weight unbalanced. Pike growls at him for trying and worries the split with his teeth until Jim is shuddering and moaning piteously.

Finally, Pike withdraws and laves the split with his tongue. "Now you make _me_ a promise," he murmurs. His breath unfurls against Jim's chin and lower lip, citrusy-sour and metallic from the last round of meds. "Swear to me upon your honor as an officer and a gentleman."

The pause draws on too long and he shakes Jim, jolting the words from his mouth: "What? What am I promising?" Jim asks, voice pitched embarrassingly high because this is a serious rite that Pike is invoking.

"Swear it first," says Pike. "Then I'll tell you."

"Fuck," says Jim, then "God," then "Yes, yes," as he's scrabbling for purchase on the slippery armrests, fingers tangling with the sleeve of Pike's jacket still hanging from the handles. "Yes, I swear it upon my honor as an officer and a gentleman."

Pike yanks him forward the bare few inches he needs for balance and shifts his leg to the side, wedging Jim's knee in the gap between the seat and the armrest. It's not comfortable; the base of the armrest is digging a sharp line into the side of Jim's thigh and Pike's kneecap is brutally round, but Jim is secure, suddenly, hovering astride Pike's lap like a recalcitrant dog.

He blinks into Pike's eyes: the yellowish-grey tint of the sclera, soft liminal shadows beneath lids, the gap on the outer left corner where, for some reason, several lashes fell out and never grew back.

"What did I promise?" Jim asks.

Pike smiles, a simple clean curve of lips, and says: "You come back alive."

Jim's next breath comes from his navel, exhaled by inertia as Pike releases him and he slides down to kneeling, hands still clinging to the sharp corners of the chair. Jim tries to clamber back up but Pike shoves him down and says,

"That's all I need from you tonight."

Jim doesn't know if Pike is saying _No thanks, I'm full,_ or warning Jim not to engage in puerile shenanigans (but that isn't what this would be, not after Jim has restrained himself for so long.)

 _I need a lot more from you,_ Jim wants to say, but Pike is out of reach already. He unlocks the wheels with a snap and swivels away, clipping Jim's fingers on the spokes when he tries to grab hold.

"Fair seas, sailor," says Pike, and then he's gone, leaving behind nothing but half-eaten lemons and a pair of wavery tracks in the carpet.


End file.
